The sky is blue, so why your plane should be simply white? Paint it in all the colors of a sunset... and pretty up the skies!

Some airline companies are clearly out-painting competition with their groovy air fleet. Often called "aircraft livery", such special paint schemes can be exciting and even inspirational. Japan Airlines with their Disney jumbo jets comes to mind, in particular, plus Australian Qantas Airways has been commissioning famous artists to come up with exotic art for their "birds".

On this page we feature some particularly wild and even outrageous airliner paint schemes, from all over the world - send us more examples you spot in the airports or even if you had opportunity to fly inside one of these yourself...

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On the subject of famous people on aircraft it's worth mentioning that the man on the tail of Alaska Airlines' regular planes is William Seward, who as Secretary of State arranged the purchase of Alaska from Russia.

One note on semantics: The paint scheme of any airliner (special or not) is known as "livery" -- more specifically, airlines have "liveries", and gthe airliners are painted in it. What you are showing are "Special" or "Commemorative" liveries.

Militaries have been doing this sort of thing for decades. The Canadian Forces, for example, have a long history of commemorative paint schemes, including several quite famous schemes for the CF-104 Starfighter (at least half a dozen different tiger-striped ones over the course of two decades, for example) and a quite spectacular blue, white and gold CF-18 scheme celebrating 100 years of flight in Canada.

Not really, even the aircraft with a "polished aluminium skin" have several coats of paint (albeit clear paint) on them. It protects the metal against the weather and against UV-radiation.

Aircraft "paint" (it's more a kind of polyurethane coating)is very specialized, it's adapted to the kind of flights the aircraft is going to do. A short-haul aircraft will have a different paint than a long-haul intercontinental jet. Also a lot of airlines have their own mix of paint suited for their operation.

But in a way you are correct, an unpainted plane would be lighter and therefore cheaper to operate. But the aircraft will unprotected and will have a much, much shorter lifetime. And planes are quite expensive to replace ;)

Actually you are incorrect Nils, American Airlines does not use a clear coat paint. The surface is polished aluminum. The planes get polished at the Main Base Visit heavy checks with what looks like a large shoe polisher on the end of a weed eater. It saves an incredible amount of weight and wear is not much of a problem due to the oxidation of the aluminum. As far as drag is concerned, a well done paint job can actually reduce the drag slightly over polished aluminum because rivet heads and seams can get filled smooth (but I re-iterate that it must be a very good paint job). One of the dilemma's AA has is what to do with the composite 787.

Does anyone know if these liveries are painted or are they done in a similar way to vehicle wraps? Since nobody is going to be that close, I can imagine the detail isn't important, but the cost of hand painting an area that large, versus printing on a decal and applying it, would be astronomical.